The ability to use freehand to provide drawing input onto display interfaces of computing devices has become commonplace. Many users use touch, a stylus or virtual “pens” or “brushes” to draw lines and ink strokes on a virtual canvas provided by display interfaces of computing devices. For example, smartphones, tablets, large whiteboard devices and many laptops feature touch-sensitive display screens where users can open a canvas application to draw shapes and figures by touching the screen or using a stylus.
In recent years, features of such drawing tools have become more advanced, enabling users to draw using a variety of types of virtual pens and brushes. For example, users may draw shapes with different line thickness, brush type, color, effect and/or shade. Additionally, applications may provide menus or functionality for selecting (or “lassoing”) a hand-drawn figure, and manually associating the figure with a user interface or editing mode. Accordingly, once drawn, the figure can be selected and edited to change line thickness, color, texture, etc. Additionally, a user may select a hand-drawn figure for conversion to a corresponding, application-generated graphical object. In this way, a user may “beautify” a hand-drawn figure by replacing it with a computer-generated graphical object. However, in this case, it can be cumbersome to switch the interface mode between drawing and editing. This is especially true when users are running drawing applications on large-screen whiteboards and other devices. In this case, users may need to walk from one side of the whiteboard to another in order to turn on an editing mode. Alternatively, to prevent needing to switch back and forth between interface modes, some applications automatically convert hand-drawn figures into graphical objects as the shapes are drawn. However, many users feel these automated features are too aggressive and, in fact, result in undermining the utility of a “drawing” application by essentially replacing it with a prefabricated graphical template application.
It is with respect to these and other general considerations that the aspects disclosed herein have been made. Also, although relatively specific problems may be discussed, it should be understood that the examples should not be limited to solving the specific problems identified in the background or elsewhere in this disclosure.